I’m an attorney, former marketing executive and publisher who has worked at Time, Scholastic, Playboy and several top ad agencies. For the past 15 years I’ve been an entrepreneur who has started and run several technology-based media companies – some successful, some not. I also the co-author of 7 books – including 3 best-sellers – and numerous articles. I’ve taught at Fordham, NYU and the Stanford Publishing Program; served on the Boards of the United States Naval Institute and the pediatric literacy program Reach Out and Read; and co-chaired the Clinton White House literacy task force the Prescription for Reading Partnership. I attended the U.S. Naval Academy and graduated from Brown University and New York Law School. My most recent book – which is a completely new version of my first best-seller – is about college admissions: Getting In!

We Need Ships

Pirates are once again threatening merchant ships off the coast of Africa. But now, most of the attacks are coming not off the eastern coast near Somalia, but in the Atlantic along the west coast near Nigeria. Moreover, today’s new pirates’ weapons, tactics, and demands are far more formidable and vastly more dangerous and destabilizing.

Unlike their Somali brethren who typically kidnap their victims and hold them for ransom, west coast pirates attack and attempt to seize ships as prizes. This past April, west-coast pirates killed one crew member and injured another during an attack on a German-owned tanker. Though the ship was being guarded by an armed security team, its force was outgunned and overpowered by the attacking pirates. As for any kind of naval protection, there was none.

So why is West African piracy up while East African piracy is down? Naval presence–or, in West Africa, the lack thereof. Today, the East African coast–where Captain Philips’s ship the Maersk Alabama was attacked–is patrolled by a task force led by the U.S. Navy, working with ships from other nations including Denmark, Australia, Pakistan, South Korea, Turkey, and the UK. (One of the authors stood up and commanded the task force.) While there were more than 170 pirate attacks off Somalia in 2010, the number has fallen to a handful today. Presence matters.

Africa demonstrates that piracy is a crime of opportunity. Pirates ply their trade in the absence of navies. And though pirate activity is rampant and growing along many of the world’s major shipping routes, the U.S. Navy is rarely to be found. The reason is achingly simple: we don’t have enough ships. This is not a question of multi-billion-dollar aircraft carriers; we simply have too few destroyers or frigates— much more modest classes of ships –capable of joining or leading international coalitions.

Current policy threatens to make a bad situation worse. Just as the Obama administration has reduced the size of the fleet by retiring ships, it has also slowed down the construction of new ones. Such a strategy threatens American security and international stability in three ways:

First, maintaining peace and stability around the world is much harder when a President – whoever he or she is – doesn’t have a credible, forward-based military presence to communicate our capabilities. Promises of pivots are less credible than the authority of being there. Leading economists of all stripes agree that world instability restricts economic growth and well-being. America is still the world’s leading global trader, and instability – pirates, conflicts, threats – has a disproportional impact on us. Over 85% of all goods in our stores arrive by the sea. If we want to maintain – much less improve and extend our standard of living to all our citizens – we need to take a disproportionately large role in maintaining the peace. That means fielding a bigger, more capable Navy.

Second, as a maritime nation, we are dependent upon ships. Yet we build almost no merchant ships domestically, and are building fewer and fewer Navy vessels. As a result, our shipbuilding industry, once the largest in the world, is now among the world’s smallest. China has the largest shipbuilding industry in the world with a 45% market share. South Korea is second with 29%; Japan third with 18%; and the European Union fourth with just 1%. America doesn’t even make the list. (We do maintain a robust ship-maintenance capability along our coasts as one might expect of a nation whose fleet is aging.) To allow our shipbuilding capability to atrophy is a strategic mistake.

Third, building ships — including Navy ships – is a remarkably cost-effective way to create good-paying jobs. The average pay of skilled, blue-collar workers engaged in ship-building is about $40-an-hour – plus benefits. For every $100,000 invested in shipbuilding, one of these able-to-support-a-family jobs is created or sustained.

Compare that to the cost of job creation under the Obama stimulus program. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office pegged the cost of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act at $833 billion. It also estimated that the program created between 500,000 and 3.3 million new jobs. Even assuming that most optimistic figure, each job created under the ARRA cost $238,000 – far more than the each job created through shipbuilding. And not a dime of that ARRA money went to building even a dinghy.

To be sure, building Navy ships isn’t always as efficient as it could be. The cost-overruns on the new Gerald Ford aircraft carrier are estimated to be about $2.4 billion over its original $10.5 billion cost. One reason for the unexpected increase are challenges with three completely new and experimental technologies that are part of this first-in-class ship; the first new aircraft carrier design in more than 40 years.

The second reason for cost-overruns is that shipyards lose skilled workers each time there is a lull in the building schedule – which is often the result of political budgeting tricks. Under the Obama administration’s stop-and-go shipbuilding policies, there is little predictability of continuous work. As a result, many skilled workers – and welders are the best example – leave, often for the shale oilfields. Newly-hired welders make more mistakes, which must be redone. (“Re-work” is the industry term.) Building ships in fits and starts as we do results in higher costs.

Stability in construction orders is the most important variable in shipbuilding efficiency. The Arleigh Burke class destroyer offers a vivid example. The DDG-51 Arleigh Burke class destroyer – the same type of ship responsible for launching the successful rescue of Captain Phillips from Somali pirates – originally required 9 million man-hours to build. The last ship in the class required only 5 million man-hours to complete. The lesson is clear: when there is a more constant flow of ship construction, costs can drop dramatically.

We need a larger Navy for peace and stability. As we approach the nation’s birthday, it is useful to remember that President John Adams pushed through a reluctant Congress funds to build a Navy — to protect the free flow of commerce across the seas. The same is true today. ”Shovel-ready” special interest projects might serve short-term economic or political interests. But if we want to create long-term, well-paying jobs that promote our nation’s security and economic vitality, we should build more ships.

This article was written with Rear Admiral Terry McKnight (ret.) the former commanding officer of Task Force 151 and the author of Pirate Alley.

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